The World is Full of Noise: Music Supervision and the Construction of Meaning Colin Arason A Thesis in The Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts (Film Studies) at Concordia University Montreal, Quebec, Canada January 2016 © Colin Arason, 2016 CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY School of Graduate Studies This is to certify that the thesis prepared By: Colin Arason Entitled: The World Is Full Of Noise: Music Supervision and the Construction of Meaning and submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts (Film Studies) complies with the regulations of the University and meets the accepted standards with respect to originality and quality. Signed by the final examining committee: ______________________________________ External Examiner Glyn Davis ______________________________________ Examiner Masha Salazkina ______________________________________ Supervisor Kay Dickinson Approved by ________________________________________________ Chair of Department or Graduate Program Director ________________________________________________ Dean of Faculty Date ________________________________________________ iii ABSTRACT The World is Full of Noise: Music Supervision and the Construction of Meaning Colin Arason The licensed music that can frequently be heard accompanying motion pictures carries with it a wealth of information in the form of contextual baggage. This study actively works to unpack this baggage and detail the ways that filmmakers may harness the power of this contextual content through allusion and explicit reference. Select examples from three feature films by Gregg Araki are used to show how this process is affected by a variety of budgets and to illustrate how music supervision can act as a tool that aids in fostering connections with social subcultures, complements activist themes, and creates additional meaning . iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thank you. … to Kay Dickinson, for being my advisor on this project and directing me toward new vantage points whenever I needed a fresh perspective on the material. … to Matthew Hays for screening The Living End in his classroom, and the conversation that initially sparked my interest in this area. … to all of the peers, friends, and family that read through various drafts of this work and provided feedback. A special debt is owed to Kaia Scott for her tireless work in organizing thesis workshops, and to the other participants who shared their thoughts and their own work: Bradley Warren, Ben Browning, Alyssa Beaton, Julia Huggins, Philippe Bédard. … to those allies who have been proofreaders, mentors, publishers and sounding boards over the years: Paul Brandon, Marina Ungureanu, Tobias van Veen, David Hanley, Marc Steinberg, Robert Skinner, Noelle Dietrich, Jon Braun, Jodi Weir, Joshua Decker, Stephen Snyder, Brett Stephan, Andy Dubois, Ticia Downie, Tonya Smith, John Erwood, Stephan Bazzocchi, Daniel Rodriguez, Marcia Fouasse, Erin Manning, Arno Michaelis, Doris Woo, Davide Caputo, Prianka Nagpal, Donato Totaro, Dave Bodrug, Richard Altman, Teresa Lobos, Adam Hannibal, Pete Cassin, Rachel Toles, Doris Payer, Blair Purda, David Carson, Geneviève Richard, Dan Adleman, Cheney Lansard, Matt Bond, Spencer Kuziw, Shawn Ellingham, Harry Chan, Rob Coles, Susan Morrison. … to the numerous musicians and filmmakers who have discussed their own work, and enriched my understanding of the intersection between sound and the moving image. Fred Giannelli, Aaron Funk, Mike Topf, Katherine Kline, Jason Snell, Jaymez, Solomon Nagler, Cinder Flame, Billy Pollard, Himadri Ghosh, Wai Cheng, Jules Lavern, Slawek Kliber, Brad Laner, Steve Bates, Kelly Money, Freida Abtan, David Kristian, Neboysha Racik, Fraser Runciman, Lynn Standafer, Oliver Lewis, William Flegal, Al Conroy, Joseph Popa, Alain Savoie, Dan Martin, Natasha Duchene, Phil Stevens, Dave Rodgers, François Robichaud, Marty Franks. … and a special thanks to Ky Lamont for everything imaginable, and to Jeff Besler, who was as enthusiastic about music and film as anyone I’ve ever met. I wish both of you were still around to read this. Endless and boundless gratitude to anyone I missed. You know who you are. v Table of Contents: Introduction The Opening Chords ........................................................................................................ 1 Chapter One Now Is The Time – Ripping The System with The Living End ......................................... 7 Chapter Two The Cresting Wave of Counterculture in The Doom Generation .................................... 25 Chapter Three Learning to Adapt .......................................................................................................... 42 Conclusion Everything in Context, and the Context in Everything ................................................... 59 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................ 64 Filmography ............................................................................................................................ 68 1 Introduction: The Opening Chords. Music has been a dance partner for the moving image since well before sound could be attached to film strips. Cecilia Hall, UCLA sound design professor and an Academy Award winning sound editor, has been quoted as saying that “[m]usic can extend the emotional and psychological range of characters and envelop and involve audiences in ways nothing else in movies can.”1 Music has the capacity to establish moods or indicate the period in which a narrative takes place. It can engage audiences or create a degree of distance, but compilation scores that make use of pre-existing music also bring a network of prior associations and meanings that can contribute greatly to what is being communicated on the screen. According to Martin Scorsese “Stanley Kubrick said once that it is the combination of images and music that is of the greatest importance to the cinema, and one is convinced of the accuracy of this observation when one watches his films.”2 Kubrick’s oeuvre includes films that merge traditional scoring techniques with the use of pre-existing music. Consider the indelible images of space craft traveling through the solar system in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the way that the discordant sounds of compositions by Krzysztof Penderecki and György Ligeti create an ominous mood in The Shining (1980), or even the use of ‘60s pop songs to accompany the events chronicled in Full Metal Jacket (1987). The material selected becomes one with the image, and we may even hear strains of it surging through our subconscious when viewing stills from these films. It is clear that the music an audience hears can resonate within the viewer and profoundly shape the way that they interpret the images that they see. Describing what the pre- existing musical selections contribute to 2001: A Space Odyssey, Christine Lee Gengaro insists that even when music is “not strictly part of the narrative, it is still an important part of the storytelling, and a significant part of the film-going experience.”3 Observing an effect, however, is much different than documenting and understanding how it works. Of course, a case study of licensed music can’t possibly cover the entire history of the practice so, for the purposes of this thesis, I have elected to examine the music supervision 2 throughout the films of Gregg Araki. This is for practical reasons. Limiting the scope of inquiry to this particular body of work affords the opportunity to look closely at how connections can be established with a variety of marginalized and subcultural communities. These films also provide ways to highlight how meaning creation through the use of licensed music is not just about fleshing out the storyline. It will be seen that music supervision is a tool that can play an important role in the communication of social and political messages. Additionally, the independent nature of these projects attests to how this can be accomplished on a range of budgets. Another reason for settling on this independent filmmaker is that Araki has been greatly influenced by a background in both music and film history, which provides rich material for a case study on how these elements fuse together. The impact of his involvement within the Los Angeles punk scene has been readily acknowledged. Matthew Hays notes that Araki’s “characters and plot lines, often soaked in cynicism and despair, reflect his background in music.”4 At the same time, his education in film history sees Kylo-Patrick R. Hart assert that “Araki, as a self-described ‘film school brat,’ is proud of his extensive knowledge of cinematic (sub)genres and auteurs.”5 Within the corpus being examined, it can be seen that these twin inspirations don’t simply exist autonomous of one another; they come together to form a cohesive whole. The way that Araki, and other independent filmmakers in the early 1990s, displayed their knowledge of film history and cultural references through works that were frequently violent led Amy Taubin to include his name amongst a list of directors that she dubbed “the sons of Scorsese.”6 This comparison with that New Hollywood iconoclast is not entirely surprising when one considers that Scorsese has been quoted as saying that “I know that without music, I would be lost.”7 Looking at works by both directors there appears to be a similar predilection for the manner in which music has been incorporated